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Written at the close of the twentieth century and vindicated by the decades that followed, this book stands as one of the most clear-eyed diagnoses of the world we now inhabit. Long before the fractures became visible, it grasped a simple, unfashionable truth: the global spread of Western mass democracy would not produce stable replicas of the West—it would transform it, destabilising its own centres and intensifying struggles over power and distribution.
If the twentieth century marked the collapse of the communist utopia, the twenty-first has begun to expose the limits of the liberal one. What was once presented as universal—human rights, global markets, supranational governance—emerges here not as a neutral horizon, but as the language through which power interprets and legitimates itself.
Against the dominant theories of the late twentieth century, this book draws a hard line between ideology and reality. It does not read the world through Western self-descriptions; it explains those self-descriptions through the concrete forces that produce them—conflict, interests, and the shifting balance of power on a planetary scale.
What it offers today is not simply prescience, but method. At a moment when analysis is saturated with moralism and abstraction, it restores a classical discipline: to see historically, to think in terms of power, and to resist the temptation to mistake ideology for reality.
Unsentimental, rigorous, and newly urgent, From the 20th to the 21st Century demands to be read not as a document of its time, but as a work that clarifies ours—and one that will shape how it is understood.
Panagiotis Kondylis (1943–98) was one of modern Greece’s most influential—and controversial—intellectuals. He achieved particular prominence in Germany, contributing regularly to Frankfurter Rundschau and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and was among the few non-German scholars to receive both the Goethe Medal and the Humboldt Prize. His work ranges from political analyses such as From the 20th to the 21st Century and Planetary Politics after the Cold War to more technical studies, including The Theory of War—a major commentary on Carl von Clausewitz—and philosophical works such as Power and Decision and The Critique of Metaphysics in Modern Thought.
Constantine Lerounis is a translator, essayist, and poet based in Athens, where he was born and raised. A graduate of the Classical Lyceum of Anavryta, he studied English literature, Latin, philosophy, theology, and Byzantine studies. His translations from and into English and Latin include legal texts, literary prose, and poetry. He has served as an adviser to the President of the Hellenic Republic and to the Archdiocese of Athens. He continues to translate and to write essays on the English Renaissance and the twentieth-century novel.